Linking Back: Front Page Resumes, Looking to the Future, and Bartending

This week's "Linking Back" is one of our most eclectic. Check out these links:

- A well meaning, but perhaps unsuccessful, plan from the Civil Rights Coalition for the 21st Century.

- Front page resumes vs. video resumes vs. regular resumes. Check the resume post from Freakonomics. FWIW I feel Freakonomics has really declined in terms of consistent quality - I remember when they used to only post once (max twice) a day and they really hit the spot with their posts.

- Is bartending a good career move?

- Countries that are looking to the future.

- Apparently people are diluting the "value" of the AP label. Read about it here on the NY Times website.

- Interesting post on blogging under your own name. I blog under CK Tutors but everyone knows who this is, so maybe I fall into either category. Regardless, I'm still waiting for #1 on Penelope's list.

The perfect (sic) public high school

Credit to the Trenches of Public Education blog for this attempt at describing the "perfect public high school" - however, I feel this is just describing the private school I went to (Galloway). If you try your hardest, you can reasonably expect a G (a G was the equivalent of a B). For most classes you had the option of the regular class or AP, depending on your level of competence.

At Galloway, I know the Upper Learning principal would always teach 1 class per quarter - but why would someone working in a staff function need to teach a class? What makes sense is having the highest administrators teach a class, so having the principal, assistant principal, and maybe a few others teach classes in their core competency.

And we never had this problem of having to kick students out of class:

Every student is also under control when it comes to behavior. That doesn't mean that the students are all a bunch of little angels. That doesn't mean that there are no students who cut up in class or who talk too much from time to time. It does mean that students know that if they don't at least try to control their behavior, the teacher has the power to kick them out of class and the principal has the power to kick them out of school. Once again, because they know that--in other words because they know there are limits--drastic measures by teachers and principals are rarely necessary.

Now I do concede that my high school was a private school, so the comparison between her post and mine is more apples to oranges than apples to apples... but the point is that such an ideal high school does exist and is an attainable goal for most public high schools. But in a private school setting, how do you give "power" to those in charge so that they can make sweeping changes to improve the public school's performance?

One potential solution is having parents get involved, but it doesn't seem like the Trenches blog favors that idea. The middle ground would be if parents all voted to give a good principal more power than they currently have to make these positive changes (and then stick to those changes) so that there are more "perfect" public high schools.

Linking Back: Cost of Students, Principals, and Video Games

In what I hope will become a useful feature of this blog, at the end of each week I will provide links from the previous week about topics that didn't quite get the attention of a full post.

- CNN reported yesterday that the U.S. spends an average of $8,701 per student.

- Newsweek had a great article on the role of principals in education. Newsweek has recently been criticized for their school rankings, which place heavy emphasis on AP courses attempted (and not enough on actual AP scores, as "The Numbers Guy" at the WSJ notes in this post).

- This was an interesting post off a comment one of the bloggers made about academic rigor (or lack thereof) in schools.

- A post on the role of video games in child development. I found it particularly interesting since my parents didn't let my brother and I get a gaming system until Playstation 1 came out. I 've always wondered what effect that had on our development, if any.

- Lastly, this is a great post on the impact teachers can have on a young student.